McCormick's gaffe

[Apologiaphoenix]

Is there a danger to bad research?

The link can be found here.

-----

Is there something else wrong with the list of 500 dead gods? Let's plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I was talking with Mike Licona yesterday who is about to interact with McCormick. In some research, I found something very interesting in the list of 500 dead gods. Mike was glad I found it, but I was going to hold off so he could use it in his presentation. He has said he has other points so he wants me to go ahead with what I found.

Now one could answer that this discovery was made after McCormick wrote his book and published his list, but it's still a problem. Why? Because it shows that McCormick really didn't even look the way he should have at authoritative sources and it could be he just copied from his prior source and who knows how his prior source researched? It certainly wasn't by any reliable means.

What I actually did was go through the list name by name. I looked at every single one. The list is bogus. Some of them I could find nothing on. Some of them were just local spirits in an animistic society. Many of them were part of polytheistic systems and thus the omnis would not really apply to them. Some were even repeats of earlier. McCormick didn't look well. I take it he just had faith that what he put up was reliable and there was no reason to look. (Remember, Skeptics like to be critical and questioning of everything, except that which agrees with them already, such as any argument against Christianity.)

Still, there is one interesting item on this list.

I took a screenshot of his blog post that dates from February 6, 2008. As it stands, this one is still up there. For our purposes, I have circled it as well in yellow so you can hopefully see it in the picture.

McCormick's blunder.jpg

If you cannot see it, I will tell you that the highlighted name is a deity named Jar'Edo Wens. This one is especially delightful to me because I get to not only point out the problems with McCormick's research, but also the problems with Wikipedia which is seen as entirely reliable. As I began to look up this deity and see what I could find, the first story caught my eye with its title.

This is a story from the Washington Post. You can read it here. Unfortunately, I have found that I am not the first to notice that McCormick uses this, but the writer I just now cite wants to focus more on Wikipedia. I think it's important to point out that not only McCormick uses this, but also so do several atheists who use the same list and think that it's funny the things that theists will fall for. I think it is sad the things many theists will fall for, but unfortunately, atheists are just as prone to believe something because it agrees with them. Anyone who shares this list has not studied it.

McCormick wants us to believe he's a researcher of the data, but he's not.

That concept is just as much a hoax as Jar'Edo Wens.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

[TheWall]

Isnt this guys arguement the whole "You dont believe in all these gods atheist just go one more" arguement?
To paraphrase Andy Bannister. Could you imagine doing that as a detective? Constaple we have erased all suspects except the murderer lets go one more.

[I am Ivo, hear me roar]

I found another big research gaffe on the front page of McCormick's blog. If you scroll down the left side of the page, you'll see he lists "Top Ten Myths about Belief in God."

Under myth #6, "If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral",
McCormick writes:

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on

Note his list of "famous atheists" includes John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

The problem of course is that neither man was actually an atheist. Adams in particular was quite outspoken about his belief in God. As this Library of Congress page shows:

John Adams continued the practice, begun in 1775 and adopted under the new federal government by Washington, of issuing fast and thanksgiving day proclamations. In this proclamation, issued at a time when the nation appeared to be on the brink of a war with France, Adams urged the citizens to "acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation; beseeching him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offences, and to incline us, by His Holy Spirit, to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction."

Benjamin Franklin, for his part, self identified as a Deist and even described what led to his conversion to Deism in his autobiography.

As a philosophy prof., McCormick should know that Deism isn't the same thing as atheism.

Further, while Franklin may not have believed in a god who intervenes to the extent that Christianity proposes, he nevertheless saw the creator at work in his life:

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done: the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions.